What Happened to The Top 10 Legislative Races to Watch?

Before the January 16 national elections in Taiwan, we picked 11 races for district legislators as indicators of the election as a whole. The 11 districts we previewed (ten plus one bonus district) ended up evenly matched, with the DPP winning six of the available seats, the KMT six, and the NPP one (KMT’s 6: Taipei 4, Taichung 2, Nantou 2, Changhua 1, Plains Indigenous, Plains Indigenous; DPP’s 6: Keelung, Taoyuan 1, Hsinchu City, Changhua 2, Pingtung 2, Plains Indigenous; and NPP’s 1: Taichung 3). The plains indigenous race was for 3 seats, as it is a multi-member district.

The results are a snapshot of the trends in the elections as a whole. As the overall results showed, the DPP overwhelmingly took the election, where the DPP and its allies performed better almost everywhere throughout the country. The most interesting phenomena in our districts to watch, however, are the number of split tickets, where voters voted for different parties between presidential and parliamentary ballots, and the drama caused by multiple candidates drawing from the same support base, allowing an opposing candidate to win with the highest number of votes.

Voting for the president, but not his or her party’s legislator

In the 2012 races, most KMT and DPP legislative candidates ran pretty closely in line with the fundamental support for their camps, which can be estimated from the support for their presidential candidates and party lists.[1] Ma and Soong combined to win a few more points than the blue party lists, and Tsai won a few more points than the green party lists. Some KMT incumbents ran ahead of their “fundamental” support, but not enough to call it a major trend.

This time, however, some KMT incumbents, especially in central Taiwan, ran far ahead of not only Chu and the KMT, but the entire combined blue camp. The math indicates that in head-to-head blue-green races, Soong’s voters cast their ballots for the KMT and not the DPP legislative candidates. Not only that, some KMT candidates won votes from people who supported Tsai and green party lists in the national races.

In Taichung District 2 (#5 on List) Yen Kuan-heng (顏寬恒) won a district where Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) had 55% of the vote and green party lists 53%. Although there was a third candidate in the district keeping Yen’s support at 47%, that candidate was a renegade former KMT member whose candidacy had been expected to help the DPP. Hsu Shu-hua (許淑華) in Nantou 2 (#7 on List) won 57% in a district where Tsai won 53% and the green party lists 50%. Likewise, Wang Hui-mei (王惠美) of Changhua 1 (Bonus District on List) got 56% despite Tsai winning 57% and the green party lists 55% in her district. Though Wang Chin-shih (王進士) of Pingtung 2 (#9 on List) lost, his 47.5% finish was far better than you’d expect from Tsai Ing-wen’s 60% support and the green party lists’ 57% support in the district. It’s not clear the KMT can replicate these candidates’ performances in other districts (the Yen family “enterprise” in Taichung 2 is too “unique,” as the family has an allegedly organized crime background) but it should at least take notes.

Too many candidates spoil the pot

Candidates who underperformed the blue fundamentals were facing the same kinds of KMT protest candidates that fractured Chu’s and the KMT’s support in the national races. Former Taipei mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) in Keelung (#1 on List) was the most famous example: despite his fame and attention he only got 36% in Keelung—just 1% more than Eric Chu (朱立倫)—while 22% of the city’s voters cast ballots for blue third-party candidates Liu Wen-hsiung (劉文雄) and Yang Shih-cheng (楊石城), allowing the DPP’s Tsai Shih-ying (蔡適應) to enter the Legislature despite winning less total votes than 2012 DPP candidate Lin You-chang (林右昌) . The near-identical support for then-KMT Chairman Chu and then-Vice Chairman Hau was very appropriate.

In the plains indigenous race (#10 on List), about two-thirds of voters cast ballots for blue parties in both 2012 and 2016, but the blue votes were much more divided this time. The numbers indicate DPP’s Chen Ying (陳瑩) seemed to draw her support from 2012’s independent voters. If the KMT had divided its votes evenly among its candidates it could have theoretically crowded Chen out, but instead Sra Kacaw (鄭天財) and Sufin Siluko (廖國棟) finished far ahead of Lin Tsung-han (林琮翰). It’s likely the former two, who were incumbents, were unwilling to and never will agree to shift votes from their personal support bases to a third KMT race. With Chen Ying now able to firm up her support by legislating for the next four years, the DPP’s new foothold in the indigenous districts seems secure.

Lee Yen-hsiu (李彥秀) of Taipei 4 (#2 on List) and Lin Tsang-min (林滄敏) of Changhua 2 (#8 on List) also faced significant opposition from challengers within their own blue camp, but Lee managed to win because the PFP’s Huang Shan-shan (黃珊珊) couldn’t maximize her potential support. The DPP had endorsed Huang in the district, and the green parties and PFP party list votes surpassed 50% there, but in the end numerous green voters declined to cast a ballot for a blue opposition candidate. In the same district, green camp candidates Hsiao Ya-tan (蕭亞譚) of the TSU, Lin Shao-chih (林少馳) of the NPP, and Chen Shang-chih (陳尚志) of the SDP-Green alliance all won 5% or more, and Huang lost by less than two percent. What made the result more painful was that the district’s voters, which were about 60% blue in the last election, had swung so far that green camp supporters outnumbered blue supporters this time, so a regular DPP candidate could have won head-to-head.

Finally, in the Hsinchu City race (#4 on List), Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) of the DPP and Handy Chiu (邱顯智) of the NPP, both tapping from similar support bases, combined for 58% of the vote. Since Tsai got 51% there, one or both of them was drawing support from the opposing blue camp. Ker seems the more likely bet because of his years of experience and strong connections; Hsinchu voters could have realized having a ruling party leader as their representative would be a good deal for them. However, Chiu did campaign very aggressively, so his idealism may have drawn protest votes against the KMT’s scandal-plagued candidate. (Ker ended up losing his chance as Speaker of the Legislature, however.)

New trends, or more of the same?

The DPP also suffered disappointment in Changhua 1 (Bonus on List), where film director Akira Chen (陳文彬) was stomped by the KMT incumbent. The 2012 Changhua 1 result showed that the voters there were more faction-oriented than party-oriented, and this result does as well. Chen ran 14 points behind Tsai Ing-wen. The DPP had opted to choose a “clean” outsider rather than one of the faction politicians who’d entered its stable in the last decade, and it paid the price—electorally at least.

In Taichung 3 (#6 on List), though she too was a political neophyte, Hung Tzu-yung (洪慈庸) of the New Power Party did a great job of uniting the green base. She finished just 2.6 points behind Tsai, whereas the DPP’s 2012 candidate for the district had finished 10 behind Tsai. Hung’s national fame, the positive image of her party, and the strong support of Tsai Ing-wen and Taichung Mayor Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) likely contributed.

Finally, the Taoyuan 1 (#3 on List) race was a solid victory for the DPP that confirmed what the 2014 mayoral election results had already indicated: the old Taoyuan County may have been blue but the new Taoyuan City is green. In 2012, the KMT won all 6 Taoyuan seats. This time, the DPP won Taoyuan 1, 2, and 4, and the DPP-endorsed independent won Taoyuan 6 and then announced he’d join the DPP legislative caucus. In the two districts the KMT held, itwon only narrowly: by 0.2% in Taoyuan 3 and 1.7% in Taoyuan 5.

Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) deserves a lot of credit for his hardwork. However, demographics are playing a role as well. Note the Taoyuan 1 vote totals: although turnout was 8.4 points lower in 2016 than in 2012, the number of votes was only a few thousand lower. This is a sign the district’s population is growing significantly, as has Taoyuan’s overall. Some political observers have stated that youths who can’t afford to live in Taipei are moving to Taoyuan and bringing their liberal political views with them. The strong finish for the SDP-Green candidate, who earned 8.7%, is another sign there are several young and progressive voters in the district now.

Let’s do the numbers

The 2016 presidential, party list, and district legislator results for all our districts to watch are listed below, along with the 2012 results for comparison. Note that the district legislative race results exclude indigenous voters who live in those districts (because they instead vote in the special indigenous districts, which are spread out nationwide).

[1]For the party lists, I counted the KMT, PFP, New Party, MKT, MCFAP, and Unification Promotion party as blue, and the DPP, TSU, NPP, FTP, and Taiwan independence parties as green. The Green Party and SDP-Greens are among the “other” parties not focused on national identity.

(Feature photo of New Power Party legislators’ first day in Parliament, from Freddy Lim’s public Facebook page.)

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Michael Le Houllier

In the Taichung Second, you can’t discount the connections of the Yan family, especially in the coastal districts of Shalu, Dadu and Longjing. Wuri and Wufeng are not large enough to counter that… yet. Wuri is growing with more college-educated, middle class people moving into the district.